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Tuesday, 13 May 2014

My grandfather told me something a long
time ago that never left me. I was sitting with him in the pub, him
drinking his pint of bitter and I, at the tender age of 7, was eating
my small packet of crisps and drinking a strong shandy due to the
bartender owning a pub in the countryside where people give much less
of a shit. We had been in silence for a lot of the time, when
suddenly a stranger entered the pub and received a lot of unsubtle
glances from the patrons of the pub, including my own grandad. The
man, who was not remarkable in any memorable way walked through the
bar area and sat down with his male companion in the corner of the
pub away from our own table.

My grandfather stared at me from across
the table, leaned in and told me that the man who had just entered
was a queer and was a blight on the village. He went on to inform me
that being in love with another man was a thing that only dirty
bastards did and that if I ever thought of doing anything like it
then I should be expected to be disowned by the family faster than
I'd known what had hit me.

In the years that followed I came to
the conclusion that my grandfather might not have been the wise sage
that he had appeared back in those days, and in some ways was in fact
quite an intellectually stagnant and irrational old and bitter fool.
But even though our opinions on the gays have changed since that day,
there is one element of his words that I can never disagree with.